Italian Sausage and White Bean Stew

This is one of those that I wasn't sure would thrill me to death, but went with it for the sake of finding something that might just unexpectedly twang my thing. After all, I do like sausage and beans and peppers, so why wouldn't it work?

Going into the recipe I deviated by using one pound instead of 1.25 lbs of sausage.

Italian Sausage and White Bean Stew
from Cooking Club magazine Fall 2013
click to print

2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 lb mild Italian sausage links, cut diagonally into 1 1/2-inch pieces
1 red bell pepper, cut into 1-inch pieces
1/2 c baby-cut carrots, thinly sliced
4 large garlic cloves, minced
2 (14-oz) cans cannellini beans, drained, rinsed
1 c lower-sodium chicken broth
1 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/8 tsp pepper

Heat large skillet over medium-high heat until hot. Add oil; heat until hot.


Cook sausage 5 to 7 minutes, turning occasionally to brown all sides.


Add bell pepper and carrots; cook 1 minute over medium heat, stirring frequently.


Add garlic; cook and stir 30 seconds or until fragrant.


Stir in all remaining ingredients; bring to a boil over medium-high heat.


Reduce heat to medium-low to low; simmer 15 minutes or until slightly thickened and sausage is thoroughly cooked and no longer pink in center.



Easy to prep, the execution of the dish took less than thirty minutes, yielding a hot, filling meal. The flavors went very well together and I liked the various textures. When reducing the liquid I simmered just a few minutes longer than 15 minutes to make it thicker than what most would probably prefer. Doing so, many of the beans split open and that gave even more texture variation.

Cutting the sausage quantity by a quarter pound didn't leave me thinking the sausage was lacking so pick a package with a flavor you like rather than buying something else because the package size fits. Not that long ago I would've gone that.

Cost:

• extra-virgin olive oil: $0.18
• mild Italian sausage links: $2.99
• red bell pepper: $1
• carrots: $0.50
• garlic cloves: $0.20
• cannellini beans: $2.58
• broth: $0.13
• fresh rosemary: $0.25

Total: $7.88 or about $1.97 for each of four servings.

Onion Soup Les Halles, Frozen 11 Months

The Onion Soup I made almost a year ago was divided into glass bowls and stowed away in the freezer. It's super convenient to have food ready to eat.

This bowl was allowed to thaw for a few days in the fridge. It didn't look a whole lot of appetizing when the lid was removed. Giving it a stir and remembering the bacon hunks gave me some incentive to go forward.


Some of soup was transferred from the bigger 4-cup bowl to a more eating-friendly 2-cup bowl which was placed in a 350°F oven.


Honey-Butter French Bread slices were spritzed with olive oil and placed on a lightly oiled baking sheet.


The slices were toasted just a few minutes, enough to get toasted without browning.


The hot bubbly soup was removed from the oven.


And piles of shredded gruyere cheese were heaped onto the toasted bread before going back into the oven.


The bread was removed from the oven once the cheese was gooey.


Excitement caused me to slosh some of the soup out of the bowl as a jammed a couple of trimmed-to-fit hunks of cheesy bread into it.



I'm not sure if it was the honey in the bread or if the freezer shelf-life of the soup is not 11 months or if I was just being paranoid about the shelf-life but something didn't seem quite right to me. I don't even know if Onion Soup should be frozen...I don't see why not since it's just onions, butter and stock. Regardless, I only ate about half the bowl (and all of the cheesy bread) before I decided I'd had enough which is unusual. The rest of the soup is going to be exiting the freezer.

Anthony Bourdain Les Halles Cookbook Mushroom Soup

I like mushrooms, sure. Mushroom soup though just isn't something I'd order from a menu. Over the past couple years I'm finding I enjoy soup, where previously my thoughts on it were along the lines of, "I have teeth and prefer to chew food that requires it rather than spooning food more suitably eaten with a straw." Yeah, too snobby for soup, yet I'm willing to slurp on a bowl of ramen like nobody's business.

Fresh stock in hand (and in freezer), I was inclined to give this particular recipe a whirl even though there won't be anything to chew.

The original recipe calls for light stock, but I'm a rebel.

Mushroom Soup

adapted from Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, also found on Epicurious

click to print

6 tbsp (75 g) butter, divided

1 small onion, thinly sliced
12 ounces button mushrooms
4 c dark chicken stock
1 sprig of flat parsley
salt

pepper
2 oz sherry



In the medium saucepan, melt 2 tablespoons (28 g) of the butter over medium heat and add the onion.


Cook until the onion is soft and translucent, then add the mushrooms and the remaining butter.


Let the mixture sweat for about 8 minutes, taking care that the onion doesn't take on any brown color.

Stir in the chicken stock and the parsley and bring to a boil. Immediately reduce the heat and simmer for about an hour.

After an hour, remove the parsley and discard.

Let the soup cool for a few minutes, then transfer in batches to a blender and carefully blend at high speed until smooth.

Mushroom soup in the making or a protein shake?

When blended, return the mix to the pot, season with salt and pepper, and bring up to a simmer again.

Add the sherry, mix well, and serve immediately.

Initially, the sherry was a little bit overwhelming, but as the soup cooled and the sherry mellowed out a little bit, the flavors were very complimentary. I can see why Bourdain specifically says to get a good sherry so as not to fuck up your soup. Not sure if the Hartley is a good one or not, I can say it certainly didn't ruin my meal.

This soup is so hearty it can almost be considered meaty. It was so meaty that I actually made unnecessary chewing motions. And it's unbelievably warming. Is it crazy that while eating I imagined myself enjoying it after a day of snow skiing? What if I told you I've never been skiing?

Will I make it again? Eh, I don't know about that. If I do, I'll put some mushroom pieces in it. What can I say, I like having something to chew on when I eat.

Cost:

• butter: $0.28
• onion: $0.57
• mushrooms: $2.24
• chicken stock: $0.64
• sherry: $0.81

Total: $4.54 or $1.14 for each of four servings.

Onion Soup Les Halles

The recipe looked pretty straightforward and I thought it would go without a hitch. I had trouble from the very start but managed to work my way through the hurdles. If you know About Me, you're aware that I'll tell it to you straight, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Onion Soup Les Halles

adapted from Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook

recipe in it's original entirety can be found here

click to print

6 oz butter

8 large onions, thinly sliced

2 oz port

2 oz balsamic vinegar

2 qts dark chicken stock

4 oz slab bacon, cut in ½-inch cubes

1 bouquet garni

salt and pepper

baguette croutons (sliced and toasted in the oven with a little olive oil)

grated Gruyere cheese, up to 12 oz

In the large pot, heat the butter over medium heat until it is melted and begins to brown.

Three minutes after melting, the butter went ahead and burned while I was goofing around. I washed out the pot and tried it again.

Seven minutes from just beginning to melt through melting, separating and foaming, the butter was just beginning to brown.

Add the onions and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until they are soft and browned.

This was just half my onions; after 15 minutes of cooking it was clear they were not going to be brown in "about 20 minutes" as the recipe suggested.

Measures were required to, as Bourdain put it, "make damn sure the onions are a nice, dark, even brown color." The onions, in such a pool of butter, were simply sweating. Clearly, onion and pot interface had to be increased.

The majority of the softened onions and butter(y juices) were transferred from the Dutch oven into a large bowl, allowing those onions remaining to get nicely browned.

Browning began occurring after 5 minutes; another 2 minutes later I saw the browning in the last photo above.

Incrementally, butter and onions (softened and fresh) were introduced to the Dutch oven, stirring as appropriate.

Butter added and combined with onions over one minute.

And now a photo montage of how I spent the next 50 minutes:

This took 8 minutes.

This took 15 minutes; I was worried that my onions were burning, but that's just some serious fond.

Three minutes -- the softened onions though were just intermingled with the brown onions and didn't get browned in that time. The juices from the onions lifted the brown fond from the bottom of the pot, adding to the illusion of the newest addition being browned.

The last of the softened onions were added and the entire mixture was stirred regularly over the next 25 minutes. I was damn sure the onions were evenly dark brown.

Increase the heat to medium high and stir in the port and the vinegar, scraping all that brown goodness from the bottom of the pot into the liquid.

Add the chicken stock. Add the bacon and bouquet garni and bring to a boil.

Reduce to a simmer, season with salt and pepper, and cook for 45 minutes to an hour, skimming any foam off the top with the ladle. Remove the bouquet garni.

Meanwhile, because I don't have fire-proof soup crocks, I prepared cheesy croutons in the oven. Preheat oven to 350°F. Spritz baguette slices with olive oil and bake in the oven on a baking sheet 5-10 minutes just to get them slightly toasted without browning. Pile high with shredded Gruyere cheese and bake another 5-10 minutes or until cheese is melted.

Dish soup into bowls and float three or four cheesy baguette slices on top of each.



While it took much longer than I'd anticipated, the results proved the efforts worthy. The soup was very filling and surprisingly meaty in flavor. Certainly a quality stock is key and I'm really glad I made my own. I'm going to have to find soup crocks so I can do the serving part correctly with the leftovers -- huge volumes of cheese covering the crock opening, spilling over onto the crock sides to become nearly burnt.

Burning the butter was simply neglect on my part. I should have had my eye on the pot once I got started instead of goofing around with whatever I was doing, maybe imaging the port, preparing the bouquet garni, whatever. Lesson learned.

The onions though, the quantity was possibly double what the recipe author was going for. I mean, I was using about 8 lbs of onions! Looking back at the original recipe, it calls for "8 large or 12 small onions," not "8 of the largest onions you can find." Had I complied with the instructions and used maybe a 3 lb bag of onions, the onion browning would have been completed in much less than the hour plus I spent accomplishing that task. Also, my final quantity of soup was a lot and it was jam-packed with onions. I am not sure if this is normal as this was the first time I've ever had Onion Soup.

Cost:

• butter: $0.86
• onions: $2.87
• port: $0.60
• stock: $1.30
• slab bacon: $2.50
• baguette slices: $0.99
• Gruyere cheese: $8.99

Total: $18.11 or $1.13 for each of 16 cups. That's 8 very generous servings for $2.26 each.

A couple years ago I made French Onion Sirloin Steak. I remember having enjoyed it but wasn't sure if it actually tasted like French Onion Soup. It did!